Left Wing

Left by Frazer Harrison/Getty Images; right by Mark Davis/Getty Images

The casting in Netflix’s new comedy, Grace and Frankie, sounds too good to be true. A Nine to Five reunion between Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin? A Newsroom reunion between Fonda and Sam Waterston? A West Wing reunion between Tomlin and Martin Sheen? Be still our hearts. But with a leading cast all in their 70s and a safe-sounding creative team like Marta Kauffman (Friends) and Howard J. Morris (Home Improvement), the last thing you would expect from Grace and Frankie is anything remotely edgy. That’s where you’d be wrong.

The plot centers on two nemeses (Fonda and Tomlin) who discover that their husbands (Sheen and Waterston) are in love with each other and want to get married now that it’s legal for gay men to do so. That’s right, homosexuality, it’s not just for your subversive prison comedies anymore! Of course, homosexuality is becoming more and more integrated into mainstream television. With middle-of-the-road network sitcoms like Modern Family and daytime talk shows like Ellen treating gay figures like the no big deal they are, homosexuality is finally achieving a long overdue normalizing status.

But a cast of beloved septuagenarian actors could bring that normalization to a whole different demographic. Grace and Frankie isn’t alone in pushing back on the notion that sexual and gender identity is a struggle that belongs to the young. Amazon’s brilliant comedy Transparent got there first with 70-year-old Jeffrey Tambor playing a paterfamilias going through a transexual transition. But that’s a much edgier concept and execution, whereas the plot of Grace and Frankie sounds like it’s lifted from the cozy British drama Last Tango in Halifax. And I mean, really, who isn’t going to tune in to see President Jed Bartlett and Law & Order’s Jack McCoy in love while Barbarella and Edith Ann go to war? Even your conservative grandma can’t say no to that.